The Internet is a global interconnection of computer networks that share a common set of protocols. Specifically, most computers coupled to the Internet use the well-known Transport Control Protocol layer and the Internet Protocol layer for data communication. The combination of the Transport Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP) is commonly referred to as TCP/IP. By sharing a set of nonproprietary well-defined data communication protocols, the Internet allows almost any computer system to communicate with any other computer system.
Sets of higher-level application protocols use the TCP/IP layers for lower level communication. Some of the better-known Internet application protocols include file transfer protocol (FTP), the network news protocol (NNTP), and the simple mail transport protocol (SMTP) for file transfer, discussion groups, and email, respectively.
One particular Internet application protocol, the HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) has become the dominant application protocol. The HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) was created for sharing HyperText Markup Language (HTML) documents. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) documents may include rich multi-media elements such as text, images, audio, and video. The HTTP protocol and the HTML document format enabled the creation of simple to use but media rich documents that could easily be “browsed”. By linking together HTML documents located on various servers throughout the world using embedded hyperlinks, a “World Wide Web” (WWW) of interconnected hypertext documents was created. Due to the simple, yet powerful nature of HTML and HTTP, the World Wide Web (WWW) portion of the Internet has become the most well known form of Internet communication.
The WWW quickly became a new mass media system for information distribution. With the help of advertising support, new media companies have created thousands of news, sports, entertainment, and special interest web sites.
The HTML and HTTP standards have been amended to handle two-way communication. Specifically, an HTTP server may present an HTML “form” to a user's web browser. That HTML form may be filled-in by the user and send back to the HTTP server. Using a processing system often known as Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script, the HTTP server can obtain the information from the returned HTML form. These interactive HTML/HTTP techniques have been used to create commercial WWW sites that can perform financial transactions. Internet-based retailers, stockbrokers, banks, etc now conduct a very large amount of commercial activity. Thus, the Internet has become the new frontier of commerce. Internet based commerce has been growing at an exponential rate during the late 1990s.
Internet based commerce involves a unique set of parameters that cause Internet based commerce to be very different from ordinary storefront based commerce. With the Internet commerce, a transaction can take place between consumer located anywhere and a merchant located anywhere. Furthermore, the computers used during an Internet commerce based transaction may perform a number of functions to facilitate the transaction. For example, the computer systems may be used to search databases for a particular item, determine availability, calculate total costs including tax & shipping, etc.
These specific parameters of Internet commerce have been partially exploited by some Internet merchants to produce shopping experiences that cannot be obtained with storefront merchant. For example, eBay, Inc. (http://www.ebay.com/) has created a large auction site that matches large numbers of individuals with unique items to sell with large numbers of purchasers. The purchasers may search for specific items available for auction using a hierarchical category system or a brute-force search. Thus, by using computer technology, eBay has been able to create a large auction market for individual items.
One difficulty with the eBay market system is that the purchaser must perform a significant amount of work to purchase a designed product. First, the purchaser must locate the desired product. Since there is no consistent set of products available, the purchaser must periodically check back to see if the desired product is available. When a desired product is located, the purchaser must then compete with other purchasers to obtain the desired product.
Even using traditional catalog style Internet retailers is a chore for purchasers. To obtain a product price, a purchaser must visit many different retailer sites to compare prices. Even after visiting several different Internet retailers, the purchaser has a difficult time comparing the various offers since the varying price, shipping, handling, and sales tax values must all be taken into account to adequately compare the offers presented by the different retailers. It would be desirable to have alternate market systems that relieve the purchaser from much of the work required to complete a retail transaction. Thus, creating additional new market systems for Internet based commerce would be desirable.